Meditation Practice, Esoteric Knowledge, Spiritual Teacher, History of Yoga

Taste preferences and their appended appetitive drives and inhibitions act as primal signifiers that quilt together the mental body with the pranic subtle energy field and the symptomatic expressions of the physical organism. The doshas refer to the balance (or imbalance) between those drives, inhibitions, and infantile complexes repressed and fixated in the unconscious strata of the mind. The Lacanian theory of how the unconscious is structured like a language fits well with the ayurvedic theory of the doshas, once we recognize the significance of the hedonic charges related to taste and how they function (in conjunction with smell, gaze, voice, kinesthesis, and maternal presence/absence) as primitive existential signifiers.

One approach (if not Freud’s royal road, it is in some cases a more direct bypass of egoic defense mechanisms) to collapsing the understructure of pathological symptoms, therefore, lies through the deliberate shifting of taste signifiers as part of a larger context of treatment that involves all seven bodies. This revolutionary approach to ayurveda parts with the traditional typing (“which dosha are you?”) that limits conventional ayurveda from attaining an adequate conceptual grasp of human complexity. We recognize, for example, that the physical organism can display one set of dosha characteristics, while the mental body reveals a very different profile.

By treating the two levels concurrently, but independently, a far more potent treatment plan can be followed. Dream analysis reveals the dosha-lock in the subconscious sector that must be released in order to have access to the underlying site map of the physical constitution. The constitution is not genetic, but composed of mental formations including decisions made in antecedent embodiments as well as in the immediate intrauterine and intercorporal phases of the samskaric trajectory. Guided visualization, perinatal and past life regression, as well as yogic and nutritive interventions may all be combined in this methodology.